Safe and pleasant recreational cycling and walking route along the Devonport Peninsula

The Devonport to Takapuna Green Route provides a coherent blueprint to deliver infrastructure that helps realise the vision of making Auckland the world’s most liveable city.

The 6km Devonport to Takapuna Green Route is a mostly off-road network of paths, boardwalks and bridges that weaves along the Devonport Peninsula through coastal edges, parks, heritage areas and residential streets. The primary purpose of the route is to support safe and pleasant recreational cycling and walking between Devonport and Takapuna.

The Green Route binds together objectives of various key stakeholders, existing infrastructure and opportunities for new infrastructure to enable a coherent and sensitive route in one of Auckland’s most sensitive and beautiful harbour environments. The scope of work needed to deal with issues ranging from strategic planning to pragmatic considerations such as buildability and affordability.

Proposals build on the coastal landscape qualities of the setting, including nearness to the spectacular Waitemata Harbour and its land, shore and water environs. This coastal quality provided the overarching design drivers.

Concept design for the first priority area, Plymouth Section, identified the particular characteristics of that neighbourhood and its physical and coastal setting to establish a nuanced and locally relevant design response. A key feature of the Plymouth section of the route is that it starts and ends at children’s playgrounds. In this context an opportunity was identified to establish a children’s trail with interpretive and exploratory design elements for children of all ages.

WSP Opus provided a number of planning and design services, including:

The Green Route fulfils Auckland Council’s overarching strategic objectives of improving connections between open spaces and along coastal areas. It also contributes to Auckland Transport’s Walking and Cycling Framework which aims to support improving community connectivity.